Tag Archives: entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship is a career path rife with stress. You’ll be working long hours to grow your startup. You’ll be dealing with inconsistent income. You might even have a significant portion of your savings invested in the success of the business.

Most entrepreneurs start their business knowing full well the challenges that lie before them. Some even find motivation in facing those challenges. But if you’re going to be successful (and stay healthy) in the long term, you need to have a reliable way to manage the stress you’ll encounter on a daily basis.

When you first start out running your own business, there are a ton of things to keep track of. Not only do you need to make sure there’s demand for what you’re offering, you need to worry about hiring the best staff and communicating what you’re doing to your customer base. You also need to make sure that you know when to follow your intuition and when you need to listen to sage advice —which isn’t always an easy task.

Members from Young Entrepreneur Council below share a few places where they misstepped and what they learned from it.

It’s not what you say, but how you say it that could determine how successful your crowdfunding campaign is, new research finds.

A study from researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago revealed that linguistic style, which is how one speaks, is critically important in crowdfunding campaigns, especially for social entrepreneurs.

The study’s authors found that how a pitch is voiced and worded is much more important for social entrepreneurs than it is for their commercial counterparts.

It can be difficult to gain credibility and trust in an industry, especially when you’re competing with much bigger companies. However, there are ways you can make your company appear larger than it is, even if you’ve only got a small budget. By investing in the right services and products, you can feel and look like a corporation, even though your business is still small.

The ability to be truthful goes directly to the heart of whether you get funding, attract customers and recruit great employees. But that is just one part of it. The ability to be wrong can determine if you survive at all.

We’ve all had bosses, friends and relatives that just couldn’t admit they’d made a mistake. We know how we feel when we know the facts and someone tells us we’re wrong or don’t understand. The longer we are in that environment, the less we trust the person, the more we doubt reality, or both.

Make no mistake, we presently live in a say anything to win environment. Sometimes people are intentionally dishonest. These situations tend to be self-liquidating. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, who famously said that having a backup plan is admitting failure, is the latest example where outright deceit brought someone crashing down. While spectacular, these cases relatively rare.

According to a report conducted by the Kauffman Foundation, supporting women-led businesses could have a huge positive impact on the economic growth of the U.S. Over the last few decades, more women have started to enter the workforce, and they began to outshine males in degrees. This led to women helping the U.S. economy by creating huge economic gains.

However, many have said that the annual economic growth of 3 percent has slowed down with the Kaufmann report suggesting that this could hit a low of 2 percent in the next few years. What’s the answer to boosting this growth again? Women.

Whether you want to connect with others online to sell a product or to raise awareness of a specific cause, it is imperative to get your site indexed by Google. This typically takes a while, and there is also a long process to get your search engine ranking raised. However, there are a few specific hacks you can employ to cut your wait time and improve your ability to quickly be found by qualified leads. Utilizing these hacks is a fantastic way for entrepreneurs to have a more solid launch for each new business venture.

Applying for small business credit can be time-consuming and frustrating. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows the average small business owner spends more than half a standard work week (26 hours) researching and applying for financing.

Unfortunately, putting in that time and effort doesn’t always pay off. The Nav American Dream Gap Report survey found that 45 percent of small business owners whose applications for financing were declined said they were turned down more than once. And research from the 2014 Joint Small Business Credit Survey found that in the first half of 2013, a quarter of firms with employees and nearly a third (31 percent) of those without employees didn’t even bother to apply because they didn’t believe their applications would be approved.

While no one wants to be rejected when they apply for credit, small business owners are at a particular disadvantage because major consumer protection laws don’t always apply to entrepreneurs seeking financing for their ventures.

Some people see entrepreneurs as leaders. Others see them as inventors. Still others see them as salespeople, or as general businesspeople. But very few people see entrepreneurs as writers.

On the surface, writing and entrepreneurship seem like completely unrelated concepts. Sure, you’ll do some writing as an entrepreneur, like in any professional position, but it’s not fundamentally necessary to become a successful business owner. Or is it?

I’d like to submit that all entrepreneurs have a role as a writer, or at the very least that they can benefit from writing regularly. Why?

6. Investors and The Rule of Rocks

Shark Tank has done a lot to raise the level of wishful thinking in America. Many people believe that if you find the right ten slides, or the perfect 30 seconds, you’ll be able to extend your hand and a check will float from the ether and drop into the palm of your hand.